Computer Science News

App teaching featured on MSDN

Microsoft Education has co-published a blog entry on UCL-CS undergraduate teaching which features app development.

The blog entry describes how traditional lecture-based teaching has been set aside by Dr Dean Mohamedally, Senior Teaching Fellow in Software Systems Engineering, by the arrival of apps –'micro software engineering' packages that are closely targeted to real-world end users who have specific requirements and problems to solve. UCL has become the first university in the UK to treat apps development as a core computer science skill and where each and every CS student solves real-world problems through deployment.

During 2011/2012 first year students built Android apps from the start of their Object Oriented Programming course. The apps they built and deployed included well-received data-gathering tools for charities working in the developing world

Dr Dean Mohamedally said "Students can now take what was previously given as a coursework exercise, harness it, and put it in a wrap up package and most importantly, ship it to do something useful."